You probably don’t know this, but a species swimming around the waters off New Brunswick is the only fish to have been in space.
Of course, they didn’t travel there alone, but the little mummified managed to meet NASA’s strict criteria for a trip to Skylab.
Found in salty estuaries along the East Coast from the Seashore to Georgia, researchers marvel at the mummy’s resilience and adaptability.
“They’re cool,” Noah Bresman, an assistant professor at Salisbury University in Maryland, said in a telephone interview.
“They can move on land. They can breathe air. They are extremely tolerant of a wide range of conditions. They live in the most extreme fish habitats.”
Noah Bresman is an assistant professor at Salisbury University in Maryland. As a student, he discovered that mummies could use visual cues to find their way to water if they were trapped by ebbing tides. (Salisbury University)
Bresman has studied mummichog since his student days.
“They also have these adorable little smiles when you look at them,” Bresman said. “You can’t help but think, ‘Oh, that’s a cute little fish,’ when you see it.”
His interest in them sparked a day working on a sea table – essentially a large, low aquarium with about 10 centimeters of water in it, used to study fish in the laboratory.
He noticed a mummy on the floor, about three meters from the tank. Fish have been known to jump and dash across land to reach nearby tidal pools.
Derived from a local word, mummichog roughly translates to “move in crowds.” Mummichog is a survivor, able to breathe air, withstand salt water and adapt to pollution. (Noah Bresman/Facebook)
Bresman thought nothing of it, just a fish that happened to jump in the wrong direction.
“So I put it back in the tank and the next day, another ‘mummy’ in the same spot, 3 feet away on the shiny floor. As if that couldn’t be a coincidence.”
Bresman decided to film the fish moving over land using a high-speed camera.
Then he noticed that the mummies stood upright on their tails for a few tenths of a second between jumps.
“So this upright behavior, it seemed functionally unnecessary for me to do two consecutive jumps. So I was like, ‘What could they be doing?’ Maybe it reorients them because they have eyes on the side of their head.”
Bresman soon discovered that fish always jump in the direction of a reflective surface, much like sunlight shining on water. Put them in the dark and they’ll bounce randomly.
“So this place where I originally found these two mummies, 10 feet from the tank, that’s where the sunlight shines … on the shiny tile floor,” Bresman said.
“And that was my first big aha moment in science, and I’ve been addicted to mummichogs ever since.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of mummichog
ACAP workers pull a net near the mouth of the Little River in St. John. They wear shoulder length latex gloves because the area is very dirty. This is where they often catch mummies. (Steven Webb/CBC)
Two workers from ACAP Saint John, a nonprofit community organization focused on the local environment, drag a seine net through waist-deep water near the mouth of the Little River.
Dressed in breastplates and latex gloves that reach almost to the shoulder, they try to catch fish as part of a monitoring program.
As they move through the water, the dark sediment is stirred up from the bottom.
Shawna Sands, ACAP’s conservation coordinator, said this spot just off Bayside Drive was her least favorite place to work, describing the water as looking “like Mountain Dew,” the greenish-yellow soft drink.
But Roxanne McKinnon, the organization’s executive director, said it was one of the places they were most likely to find mummies.
ACAP Saint John workers Shona Sands, left, Koa Ngo, center, and Shailene Braden look for small fish and shrimp in a net (Stephen Webb/CBC)
“We often find mummichogs here in Little River and also in Marsh Creek in the front cove, which is one of our other fishing spots, and we’ve had them very occasionally in Spar Cove as well,” she said.
“All of these areas are not the most pristine places we have here in St. John. They are famous [for] stormwater impacts, various fecal contamination issues, and creosote contamination issues at all of these sites.”
Mummichogs make their homes in places often abused by humans. But it does mean they are valuable to scientists studying the effects of pollution.
Typically 7.5 to 9 centimeters long, they have stocky bodies and prominent tail fins, small sharp teeth and a prominent mandible, with colors similar to their habitat.
Their name comes from a local word that roughly translates to “moving in crowds.”
They showed an amazing ability to adapt.
In space
NASA chose them over goldfish, another remarkably hardy species, because agency scientists believed the fish had the best chance of surviving the launch.
Not only did they survive the trip, but they seemed to quickly adjust to being in a bag of water in a weightless environment.
They immediately oriented themselves to turn their backs on the light, just as they do with sunlight here on Earth.
For several weeks, they swam in tight circles, but eventually returned to their normal swimming patterns.
But their ability to adapt here on Earth is so useful for scientists.
Richard Di Giulio began studying mummies in the Elizabeth River near Norfolk, Virginia.
Duke University’s Richard DiGiulio has been studying mummification for nearly 30 years. He says their ability to adapt to chemical pollution is amazing. (Duke University)
Some fish lived near several former lumber mills where creosote seeped into the waterway for nearly a hundred years.
The Duke University scientist said he became interested in them after researchers placed mummies that lived in clean water into the polluted water that mummies had lived in for generations.
“It’s just so dramatic,” DiGiulio said in a phone interview.
“I mean, the fish on the clean side put in the tanks that had Elizabeth River mud in them … killed them outright, 100 percent killed them and had no effect on those from that location. And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.'”
Since then, he has studied them for about three decades.
“They are one of the best examples of the evolution of pollution,” he said.
Di Giulio said the fact that they spend their entire lives in one area and have the ability to withstand pollution without dying is valuable to a toxicology researcher.
“They are like the canary fish in the mine. If you catch [a mummichog] somewhere and you see something like cancer or whatever, some effect on it, you can be pretty sure it’s due to whatever happened in that place.”
Although she is now president of Wilfrid Laurier University, Deborah McLatchie still studies mummies in the lab. She began her work with them at UNB in St. John’s in the 1990s, studying the effects of pulp mill wastewater. (©fresh/Wilfrid Laurier)
That’s why Deborah McClatchy has been studying them since the mid-1990s when she was at the University of New Brunswick in St. John’s.
“They were living in environments, some of which were very clean and pristine, and some of which were exposed to a variety of wastewater, whether it was from the pulp mill or from the treatment plants, from the oil refinery and other areas,” McLatchie said in an interview from the university Wilfrid Laurier, where he is now president of the school.
MacLatchy’s research on mummichogs exposed to pulp wastewater showed how the chemicals affected fish reproduction and led to changes in the industry.
She is still doing research with them in Wilfrid Laurier’s lab and believes the fish will give scientists insight into climate change in the coming years.
“Although they are hardy, they have limitations, for example the temperature ranges they will survive in,” she said.
A young mummified is shown in the Wilfrid Laurier University laboratory. (Liz Brown/Wilfrid Laurier)
“So as we think about … climate change and other impacts for the mummichog and all the other species, we need to understand how this interaction between … habitat change, environmental temperature change, etc., will play out for these species.’
MacLatchy is happy to have an interest in mummichogs “because they are, especially in New Brunswick … just such a really, really, really important fish. And they are…pretty good [across] North America, this really cool, universally recognized research fish.”
“I guess they just like to hide their light under a bushel a little bit.”
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